DATABASE DESIGN

SERVER HEALTH CHECK

About Us

SQL Server consultancy

We are a Microsoft Partner and offer support for your database platform, resolving database issues, ensuring high performance and data resilience.

We provide consultancy and guidance for technology reviews and implementors offering clients assurance, technology proof or concepts, fall back support services and outsourced database development projects.

We provide SQL Server skills that can be used alongside your existing development teams. Database design, schema design, T-SQL code and performance tuning are just some of the services we offer.

PEOPLE

Kevan Riley

Kevan is the founder, owner and principal consultant of Riley Waterhouse Limited.
Read more

Testimonials

Having known Kevan for several years now I can thoroughly recommend him as a great DBA. We both spend spare time as moderators on SQL Server forums helping others and Kev has helped me several times with tricky XML data issues. He is a rock solid SQL professional and offers well thought out recommendations and opinions clearly and honestly.

Kev was an integral part of large data migration project. He very quickly picked up the domain knowledge and was meticulous in his testing and checking. Kev was able to work without assistance for long periods and achieved great results on time. Technically he provided great SQL support to the application team. I’ve no hesitation in recommending him for your SQL needs

I worked with Kevan on a high profile project to implement a variety of modelling tools on a multi-dimensional reporting tool that fitted the business needs for examining performance in a multitude of ways. Kevan was integral to achieving the succcess of the models’ deployment, bridging the gap between the business requirements and the technical implementation of them, a rare and valued skill. The business models on stock and returns management in particular became established management practice in a short space of time, due to their design and usefulness to the business, to which Kevan was a key contributor

Latest posts

I’ve been speaking a lot more this year (well compared to last year when I didn’t deliver any sessions at all!) and so in an effort to organise my content better and make it easier to share I moved my slides and demos to GitHub. I decided to also move all my previous sessions up Read more about New home for session content[…]

It is often far too easy to experience some behaviour in SQL Server, and then extrapolate your belief from that. One example that is seen frequently on forums is the simplistic case of concatenating values into a scalar variable, however the logic that is commonly assumed is false. Take the example USE tempdbGOIF OBJECT_ID(‘CharsTable’,’U’) IS Read more about Building a string of values in T-SQL[…]

In my last post, I showed how a check constraint can be used by the optimizer to completely rule out any data access, however there are some rules to abide by. Lets recap We created a check constraint on Person.Person table in AdventureWorks2014 so that when we queried for any rows with a ModifiedDate earlier Read more about Trusting Constraints[…]

The Query Optimizer in SQL Server is an amazing piece of code. It takes any query we choose to throw at it, evaluates many different ways of executing that query and, generally speaking, comes up with an execution plan that is going to be good enough. And it does all that in milliseconds. Sometimes it Read more about Helping the Query Optimizer with Constraints[…]

Returned to the Leeds SQL Server User Group for the first time in a long time. I previously worked in the office building that hosts the user group, and wow has it changed! Not only was it a long overdue return, but it was also my first time presenting at Leeds too. Here are the Read more about Leeds SQL Server User Group – 1 December 2016[…]

As promised here are the slides and demos from my session at Manchester SQL Server User Group on Wednesday 19 October 2016. Tune the query not the plan – Slides Tune the query not the plan – Demos Was a great night, and my first ever session at my home user group!!

Its been a good year so far for the SQL Server community in the North West, as we’ve just had SQLBits XV in Liverpool, at which a Liverpool based user group got off the ground too! Next up is SQL Saturday Manchester, returning for a second time after it’s successful launch last year. Venue is Read more about SQL Community thriving in the NW[…]

I’m working on a project where we have recently started to use SSDT more and more. One feature I make use of, is Database References [http://schottsql.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/ssdt-external-database-references.html], and use DACPACs as the source of these references. To keep this simple for the distributed development team and have one version of the truth, I keep the DACPACs Read more about Automate DACPAC refresh with PowerShell[…]

There have been a few posts about SSMS Activity Monitor recently. First Kendra Little (b | t) talked about why she doesn’t like it and then Guy Glanster (b | t) and Matan Yungman (b | t) also discussed the failings of Activity Monitor on their SQL Server Radio podcast – mainly it’s to do Read more about SSMS Activity Monitor greyed out Processor graph[…]